Assumptions
by Lil-Samuu
Summary: Oneshot set after the game during the exsphere collecting quest. Colette's thoughts about being the Chosen and being famous.


A post-game one-shot set during the exsphere collecting quest. More angsty than fluffy this time. Colette's thoughts on being the Chosen and being famous.

Spoiler warnings: contains spoilers for right up until the end of the game.

Disclaimer: I don't own Tales of Symphonia. I believe that it belongs to Namco. I'm just an obsessed fan who has written a silly amount of fanfiction about it.

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It was irritating, Colette thought, when people made assumptions about her based solely on her title. Such comments as "she's the Chosen? I thought she'd be taller," weren't too bad, it was when people made assumptions about her as a person that it annoyed her. 

Some people expected her to be some kind of super hero, thinking that she could right every wrong in the world, getting angry when she could not. She was only human though. Well, technically now she was an angel, but she was still a human inside. Some people seemed to forget that, however, thinking of her only as a title. A title she had not even chosen for herself, one that had been placed upon her.

She had tried to do the best that she could, in everything she did, not just matters relating to being a Chosen, but that, it seemed, wasn't good enough. Despite the fact that she and the group that she had been a part of had managed to reunite the two worlds and were now gradually working to make the world a better place she still heard complaints, felt glares boring into her, all because she wasn't perfect.

She had never claimed to be perfect, she was, indeed, aware that she wasn't. She had tried her hardest to do what she could and yet still people criticised. It didn't seem to occur to them that she was just like other people, although she would have been quick to reassure them that she was if they'd have given her the opportunity. She was just trying to do her best to survive and do the job she had been given as well as she could. It just happened that many people were interested in the outcome of her tasks.

It seemed to her that people only paid attention to the outcomes of a select number of her efforts and judged her solely on those. That frustrated her, they had never met her and yet they seemed to think they could sum her up totally simply by considering the results of her hard work during the regeneration journey and what other people had said about her.

Some people seemed willing to believe anything, she had overheard all sorts of false claims about herself while having dinner or a drink in bars with Lloyd. One person, for example, had told his captivated audience that the Chosen herself had once told him that she could cure mortal illnesses by giving someone one of the feathers from her wings. She had never met the man and had certainly never claimed any such thing about her feathers. Yet the people around the bar seemed to accept this man's words without question and they would, no doubt, pass them on to others who would also accept them as truth.

It made her want to scream but she avoided doing so. If she drew attention to herself, told people that she was the Chosen and tried to let them know that what they had heard was false, then she would be mobbed. People would come up to her and either demand that she perform some miracle for them or try and attack her because, they believed, she had done a poor job of being the Chosen and blamed her for things that weren't her fault.

As knowledge, both true and untrue, about the heroes of regeneration spread she and Lloyd increasingly checked into inns under false names. Trying to collect up and destroy all of the exspheres was a difficult enough task on its own, they didn't want to spend energy they didn't have battling off attention at the end of the day when all they wanted to do was have dinner then fall asleep side-by-side.

She was glad that she had Lloyd's support, both on the journey of regeneration and now on this new quest. She treasured her relationship with him, it was one of the things in her life she considered to be very successful. They worked together to support and care for one another, helping each other achieve their goals.

Of course the people who seemed to always be complaining about her being a failure wouldn't be interested in that particular success. They were only interested in things that she did that affected them directly, major achievements that would be written down in history books, they didn't think of her as a real, living person it seemed. When she died people would probably, she thought, continue to judge her and think they knew all about her simply by reading information that someone had selected to write down because they thought it was noteworthy and important enough to do so.

Everyone had accepted that Mithos had been a great hero because they had been taught that in history lessons and read it in books. They did not stop to question whether or not that was really the truth. Telling people the truth about Martel and Mithos was going to be difficult she knew, it was something that may take a very long time and some people might never accept it. People didn't want someone they considered a hero figure to be shown to be a selfish and manipulative person even if he had been one.

She wondered what people would say about her in the future. Would they, for example, say that she had been a selfish Chosen for not simply going along with being sacrificed, even though the world was now a much better place because of what she and the others had done? Would people forget that Chosens were sacrificed in order to switch the flow of mana and that, when there had been two worlds, there had always been one world in decline whereas now the worlds had been reunited as long as the tree was tended to properly vying for mana was not something people would have to worry about?

She frowned and shook her head, moving to scratch Noishe between his ears before settling back down in the sleeping bag she was sharing with Lloyd, wrapping her arms tightly around him.

She decided that, despite the fact that it was incredibly frustrating and unfair, it didn't matter. The people she cared about, her friends and the people she considered her family, accepted her, faults and all. She knew that Lloyd loved her deeply and truly and would always do so. That was what mattered, not the opinion of someone she would probably never even personally meet.


End file.
